In which we have a look at this week's
New York Times Book Review.
Fiction & Poetry
Seamus Heaney's new collection of poems,
District and Circle,
gets a nice review from fellow poet Brad Leithauser. Sympathetic and favorable,
it begins with a paragraph about judging poets by their approach to rhyme, and
goes on to suggest that Mr Heaney's rough rhymes (of which, unfortunately, he
provides no examples) correspond eloquently to the Irish topography that is
never far from his verse.
Heaney has always had a gift for recounting chance encounters, poignant
little anecdotes. His voice carries the authenticity and believability of
the plainspoken - even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but
plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and
ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary
while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary
person might actually say.
In fiction, two novels, both of South American
extraction, get full-page treatment, while two novels with academic settings get
reviews that share a page. And then there's Andrew Sean Greer's puzzling review
of Voodoo Heart: Stories, by Scott Snyder. Mr Greer believes that the
collection consists of two remarkably inventive stores and five workmanlike
ones.
Snyder's true talent is revealed when he lets his imagination
soar. In the final story, a young man, barnstorming his way across the
Midwest, finds a runaway bride in his biplane. When he sits with her by a
campfire and they invent a fictional account of their courtship and wedding
- "you took my hand and we went out the bedroom window and climbed down the
rain gutter together" - they transport us to the beautiful, quiet, darkened
room of the best fiction. The sound of traffic disappears and time flows
away and we're in the middle of that primal American narrative: the
invention of the self. We read on to see if the runaway will really climb
out on that airplane's wing. And when she does - "a pretty girl in a blue
dress, head thrown back, the wind in her hair as she passed overhead" - the
moment is pure ecstasy.
Sympathetic
reviews are effective because they enter into the quality of their subject
matter and so share it with the review's reader. As William H Gass says in his
essay about Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (in The Temple of Texts),
quality cannot be reported. But it can be captured and presented. The paragraph
that I've just quoted indicates to me that neither Mr Snyder nor Mr Greer is a
writer about whom I want to know more, but that's the point. The selfsame
paragraph may leap out appealingly at you.
Hugo Lindgren's review of the latest Manhattan prep school
nightmare, Academy X, by Andrew Trees, is
almost funny.
The first 10 or 20 pages, chockablock with strained humor and
banal pronouncements..., were so dreadful that getting through this rather
thin novel suddenly felt like a homework assignment from hell.
Nevertheless, Mr Lindgren
wolfed down the last 100 pages in under an hour, and though I did
not feel particularly well-nourished as I closed the book, I did have the
strength to live myself off the couch.
Lisa Zeider is a lot harder on Lawrence Douglas's
The
Catastrophist. The novel is about an art historian who, like the author,
specializes in Holocaust memorials, and Ms Zeidner all but states that Mr
Douglas's academic work on the subject is more interesting than the novel.
But while Daniel has his moments of dry wit ... , all the female
characters, including the one whose native language is German, sound pretty
much alike, and it's hard to imagine what they would see in this nail-biting
narcissist.
Liesl Schillinger's review of
Marie Arana's Cellophane and Pico Iyer's review of
Turing's Delirium,
by Edmundo Paz Soldan (translated by Lisa Carter) share a strange squint-forcing
glare that I can only attribute to efforts to place these novels in the context
of Latin American literature generally and in relation to magical realism in
particular. Mr Iyer, while trying to show how the Bolivian Mr Paz Soldan has
left magical realism behind, manages to make Turing's Delirium sound too
virtual and paranoiac to be any less strange than fiction by Gabriel García
Marquez. Ms Schillinger, far more sympathetic to her book, attempts to summarize
Ms Arana's very strange story about an engineer who takes his family into the
Peruvian jungle in order to set up a Cellophane factory, but ends up making it
sound overwrought. Her review is perhaps tellingly entitled "A Wilderness of
Mud."
Nonfiction
The cover of this week's review shows the head of Henry Ward
Beecher, and my first thought was "Do I have to"? There's something so
unappealing about Beecher's clenched jaw, sad eyes, and straying white hair that
I read the pendant review very much under duress. According to Michael Kazin,
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, by
Debby Applegate, is an exception to the rule that "[f]ew great preachers in
American history have been well served by their biographers." His review,
however, makes a case for regarding The Most Famous Man as a masterwork
in American studies - as much about Beecher's America as about the man himself.
A whoppingly successful preacher brought low by an adultery trial, Beecher was
one of the principal manufacturers of the mush of American Christianity.
Whenever you hear a sentimental sermon - whatever the preacher's
denomination, race or political leanings - echoes from Beecher's Plymouth
Church are actually ringing in your ears.
Richard Labunski serves up another slice of American history in
James Madison
and the Struggle for the the Bill of Rights, but Gary Rosen is unimpressed
by the attempt to put the famously reticent and cerebral Madison at the center
of a lively story. And he's not sure that Mr Labunski truly understands his
subject.
But was passage of the Bill of Rights equally "pivotal"? Labunski
plainly thinks so, but Madison did not. For him, amendments were largely a
means to an end, a way to secure popular support for the new government,
whose powers he was determined to preserve. Of Madison's view that
"parchment barriers" were unlikely to stop an oppressive government or
majority, Labunski is dismissive.
On the
United States of today, German journalist Josef Joffe has written
Überpower: The Imperial Tempation of America.
Roger Cohen doesn't care for Mr Joffe's prose style (too much alliteration), and
he's not terribly sympathetic to Mr Joffe's thinking, either. This dooms his
review to near meaninglessness. What are we to make of this conclusion?
Überpower is a brilliant polemic for benign American
centrality, a reminder that America remains a force for good in the world.
But it is an unconvincing, often irksome prescription for how that can
endure?
Nor did I derive much satisfaction
from Stanley Fish's review of Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned
Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New
York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving Left Wing Freak Show, by
Geoffrey Nunberg. This extremely unsympathetic review (a form of which Mr Fish
is something of a master) aims to present the book's arguments while arguing
against them or finding them inadequate. The result is a mean-spirited scold.
This is not to disdain the truth: in the final analysis the
question of what is true and false is paramount. But Nunberg isn't offering
a final analysis here, only a rhetorical and political analysis. [?] His
claim that he is allied with the truth against the forces of conservative
darkness may be endearing, but it is utterly unhelpful.
And so is Mr Fish's review. As if to show how to scold with
style, Jennifer Senior, writing on Friendship: An Exposé, by Joseph
Epstein, asks, "How interesting can the observations of a man who avoids such
entanglements be?" and then answers, "not so very." I'm afraid that my
own disappointment with Mr Epstein's Snobbery infected my reading of Ms
Senior's review, but I still think that she cites enough examples of Mr
Epstein's retrograde mentality to show that Friendship is a book written
about the Fifties, not about today. It's all right to be unsympathetic toward
books that have so little raison d'être.
Alan Light gives John Strausbaugh's
Black Like You: Insult &
Imagination in American Popular Culture a sensitive review - sensitive, that
is, to the hot-button associations that blackface minstrelsy has (rightly) taken
on, after decades of condescending cluelessness. Although he believes that "[t]oo
much of Black Like You is taken up with Strausbaugh's railings against
multiculturalism and the language police," he concludes that
the contribution made by Black Like You far outweighs any
disputes about its details. Strausbaugh has taken a disturbing piece of
American cultural history and illustrated the ways that this music, for
better and for worse, helped shape our world. As these songs performed for
white audiences by white men painted black, based on songs sung by black men
that might have been written by white men, gained popularity, he writes,
"the question of whether minstrelsy was white or black music was moot. It
was a mix, a mutt - that is it was American music."
In Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope,
Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi writes (with Azadeh Moaveni) of
disillusionment and worse in an apparently moving account of her career as a
former Iranian judge who participated in the Islamic Revolution but soon found
that women's equality with men was not an operating principle of the new regime.
Laura Secor's review is very sympathetic, and furnishes abundant quotations.
What we do get is a complex and moving portrait of a life lived
in truth, as Vaclav Havel would put it, within the stultifying confines of a
political system intended to compel passivity. Ebadi is well aware of the
compromises forced on her as she works to curb the Islamic legal system's
worst excesses.
Edward Rothstein disagrees
with the late Edward Said's thesis in On Late Style:
Music and Literature Against the Grain, a posthumous essay
cobbled together by critic Michael Wood from lectures delivered in London and
classes taught at Columbia. But he does so so gracefully that one engages with
the book, if only to take part in a conversation about beautiful music.
Late style, Said suggests, expresses a sense of being out of
place and time: it is a rejection of what is being offered. But listen to
Beethoven or Strauss or Gould: the music is more like a discovery of place.
That place is different from where one started; it may not even be what was
once expected or desired. But it is there, in resignation and fulfillment,
that late works take their stand, where even exile meets its end.
[I must say that I was surprised by Mr Rothstein's failure to object to Mr
Said's writing of Mozart's "late style." In Mozart's case, any "lateness" was
purely fortuitous. Mozart did not die resigned and fulfilled; he died of
overwork and something like mania. He was holding on to life a little too hard.]
Tara McKelvey reviews five books in a Nonfiction Chronicle
¶ The Mighty and the Almighty:
Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, by Madeline
Albright with Bill Woodward. "Her positions and reasoned and enlightened -
though hardly surprising - but at times the prose evokes a Center for
American Progress special report and, on other occasions, a United Nations
fact sheet, filled with bland quotations, rhetorical questions and,
tragically, Yeats paraphrased: 'It is when the best lack all conviction and
the worst are full of passionate intensity that things fall apart.' At this
point, even a supporter of her views may wonder: Is nothing sacred?"
¶ The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington,
Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's
Newfound Sovereignty, by William Hogeland. The author "fails
to make the case that the battle should have been fought - especially since
the tax was repealed in 1802, 11 years after the rebellion began. Still, he
conjures up a lively post-Revolutionary War world where everybody - man,
woman and child - drinks hard liquor 'at all times of day'..."
¶ Doolitle, by Ben Sisario. "A
friend of mine once had a girlfriend who kept a careful diary. 'Never has so
much been written about so little,' he'd say. You could say that about
Doolittle, too, an entire book devoted to a Pixies album."
¶ The Collar: A Year of Striving and Faith
Inside a Catholic Seminary, by Jonathan Englert. Of Mr
Englert's report (he was not himself a seminarian): "His account of their
spiritual journey often seems superficial and rushed - especially
considering the church's teachings on patience. Yet Englert conveys the
courage and selflessness of his characters, all of whom at least try to
follow St Francis of Assisi's advice: 'Preach the Gospel always - if
necessary, use words'."
¶ Possible Side Effects, by
Augusten Burroughs. ["TOT" = the Triumph Over Tragedy genre so popular in
women's magazines] "Yet a Burroughs essay, even at its most poignant and
confessional, is the anti-TOT. Unflinchingly, he gouges himself (literally
and figuratively), bleeds, gets it on paper - often without a neat
resolution or the genre's obligatory epiphany - and then makes you laugh.
Now that's genius."
Allen St John gives
Full Swing: Hits, Runs and Errors in a Writer's Life, by Ira Berkow, a
warmly sympathetic review.
Full Swing is like a great ballpark conversation, where
everything and anything is fair game. In the process of layering story upon
story, connecting tangent to tangent, each memory marking the passage of
time, Berkow reveals himself to be curious, contrarian and a steadfast
champion of the underdog. You'll never look at his byline in quite the same
way again.
Benjamin Kukel's Essay, "Misery
Loves a Memoir," takes a jaundiced look at the popularity of memoirs these days.
So it is that we live in a rich and free country, full of
striving individuals chasing comfort and distinction, whose autobiographical
literature tells us that helpless addiction and passive suffering are the
most meaningful experiences you can have.
